The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  She was already, in her mind, selecting tiles for the bathroom and discussing with Maria what colour the kitchen should be.

  She had asked them to think about it. However, just as, both at the time and afterwards, Maria preferred not to reflect upon her motives for accepting, so, beforehand, she preferred not to reflect upon whether she should accept. And part of that faint sense of shame and foreboding she felt when she and Giuseppe did sit down over the kitchen table and say, rather stiffly to each other, ‘Well’, came from her knowledge that whatever there was to consider regarding this quite major change in their lives, she wasn’t going to. Of course they would go to the new house, she told herself—and saw that Giuseppe was telling himself—and of course they would take up their new jobs. They’d be mad not to, wouldn’t they? After all, when you looked at where they were living now, in this old dark apartment with its cracked walls and floors, its dampness in the winter and suffocating heat in the summer, its views only of other damp, dark apartments, and narrow, sunless streets, I mean, really, she thought, who in the world wouldn’t move and what is there to think about? Unless, perhaps, what colour the kitchen should be …

  The other thing, the greater thing, that made Maria and, she was sure, Giuseppe, feel that faint sense of shame and foreboding, as they had their brief and useless discussion about their future, was the idea that by accepting Amelia’s offer they were delivering themselves a little too thoroughly into the hands of the Cavalieri family and were, as a result, losing their freedom and putting themselves into some sort of danger.

  Still, she told herself, there’s probably nothing to worry about. If we do find ourselves becoming too involved, well, they’re only here for two or three months a year. And when you think of a new house, and the extra money, and a view …

  She hardly slept that night, and gave Amelia her answer first thing next morning.

  *

  Later, Maria was to think that if only she had realised that her sense of foreboding was justified as soon as it became so, she might have been able to pull back. But it became so so very soon and so obliquely that she didn’t, at the time, nor for some time thereafter, make the connection.

  ‘I mean,’ she would sometimes tell herself, ‘I was looking to the future, at all the summers to come. I wasn’t thinking about what was happening there and then. Besides, all the other events of that summer seemed totally separate from the issue of our acceptance. As in a way, I suppose, even now it could be claimed they were. So how, when I was in the thick of things, I could have been expected …

  ‘Though it’s possible,’ she would sometimes add, ‘that even if I had made the connection I might not have pulled back. Because I was so excited at the prospect of having a new house. And since by then it was too late anyway …’

  The first thing to occur in the post-acceptance part of that summer, as it became clear that whatever restrictions there were regarding the development of The Villa’s garden, they were going to be ignored by Amelia’s husband, was that Giuseppe, quiet and neat at the best of times, now became almost obsessively so. It was as if he were guarding his quietness and neatness, and were afraid of seeing them damaged. He let himself into the apartment so silently that half the time Maria didn’t know he was home. Having always changed after work into clothes that, though sober, were comfortably informal, he suddenly started to dress up, so that as he sat at the kitchen table eating his dinner, he looked as if he were at a wedding, or a first communion dinner. And from being a man of merely few words when he was around the house, he became a man of virtually no words at all, and while remaining as courteous and kind towards his wife and daughter as ever, expressed his courtesy and kindness only in a series of melancholy, strained expressions and the occasional gesture that was made not as if it were natural to him, but as if he were forcing himself to make it.

  A state of affairs which both Maria and Elisabetta commented upon, but which Giuseppe simply shrugged off, telling them, with an air of desolation that made nonsense of his words, that he just felt like being quiet at the moment, and wanted to dress up.

  ‘But in the summer, Papa?’ Elisabetta asked, laughing and throwing her black hair back, and looking beautiful in a bright orange and yellow dress. She stroked her father’s grey hair with her sun-brown, pink-nailed hand. ‘And anyway, even in the past you’ve never been this quiet.’

  Event number two consisted of Gisueppe’s telling Maria, one night in bed when she asked him again why he had been so silent of late, that he was very sorry and he knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t bear the idea of losing Elisabetta; whose marriage and subsequent transferral to Cagliari were fast approaching.

  ‘I mean, I know Piero is a very nice boy and we couldn’t hope for a better son-in-law. I’m sure they’ll be very happy together. But she’s so beautiful, isn’t she, and so alive, and being our only child and … Oh, you know.’ Of his telling Maria this, and of his starting to behave thereafter not just as if he were the possessor of some sad secret, but as if he had suffered some unendurable blow and were mourning a loss for which he would never be consoled.

  His mourning took the form of his going every day now to The Villa, to work on what would remain of the garden after the new apartment house had been completed, or, in contrast to his silence at home, to spend hours standing under a tree talking to Amelia Cavalieri about, Maria gathered, English gardens, his coal-mining father, the way that Santa Teresa was changing and the way the world was changing. Talking to her, it occurred to Maria when she saw them together, as if Amelia alone understood the nature of loss; and as if Amelia alone, just by understanding, could at least give him the scent of consolation, even if she couldn’t present him with the flower itself.

  Event number three of that confused and turbulent summer consisted of Giuseppe’s telling her, the very evening of Elisabetta’s wedding-day—a wedding-day throughout which, after all, he had seemed to be in the best of spirits and had made Maria think and hope that he was starting to come to terms with his daughter’s departure from the family home—that he had been in great pain the whole afternoon. ‘All my jaw,’ he said, ‘and the inside of my cheek and nose. I think if it isn’t better tomorrow I’d better go to the doctor.’ Of his telling her this, and of his being told by the doctor—an opinion that was soon confirmed by a specialist in Sassari—that he had a rare and malignant disease of the membranes of his cheek and nasal passages. A disease that, though treatable, was incurable, and while it would go through periods of remission, would ever more frequently cause recurrences of the pain he was feeling at present, and would slowly and inexorably, as it ate away the bones of his jaw and nose, disfigure him.

  And events numbers four and five, after the shock of this news, consisted of Giuseppe’s not quite announcing to Maria that he had lost his faith, but of his making her understand it anyway; and of Maria’s coming to realise that she too, in a funny sort of way, was ‘in love’ with a member of the Cavalieri family.

  But first: Giuseppe’s loss of faith.

  Maria herself was a reasonably devout Catholic, and either because of this, or because she was temperamentally inclined to accept rather than reject, and make the best of a situation, however wretched it was, she could never bring herself to think that society should be changed in order to improve the material circumstances of people like herself. This despite the fact that if now she was middle-aged she was almost comfortable, she had been raised in a poverty still more extreme than Giuseppe’s. If change was desired it was up to the individual to change, that was how she looked at it; and if things were in a sorry state, then it was God’s will that they should be so. ‘One is born holding a particular piece of music,’ she was taught by her thin, bitter, wheezing father, ‘and either one sings that tune, to the best of one’s ability, or one doesn’t sing anything at all. One simply rants and raves, and makes a noise, and in the end come to silence anyway.’ A lesson she came to believe.

  She came to believe it. That did not make her
believe however, like her father, that the people who had the best tunes, so to speak, were also the best people. Nor did she think that because it was God’s will that things were in a sorry state, they were not really in a sorry state at all. They were, she knew: one only had to look around to see that. And though she accepted those things and believed it was up to the individual to make changes in his or her own life, if he or she so desired and were capable of it, she couldn’t help admiring those who did not sing the tune they had been handed at birth, and did rant and rave. She believed, but she didn’t see why everyone should. Moreover, those who didn’t, well, it was only right that they should make themselves heard in whatever way they chose. She loved her father, and felt sorry for him, and she was grateful for what he had taught her. All the same, she couldn’t help wishing at times, for his own sake more than hers, that he had taught her something else; and couldn’t help thinking that if he had he might have been a happier, healthier man. For the tune that he sang was a depressing, discordant dirge, destined to be brief and to finish unresolved; and probably, in his case, rants and raves would have been sweeter.

  Besides, she sometimes wanted to ask him after his death, what is a man to do if he is handed some lusty revolutionary hymn at birth?

  It was because she felt as she did that, when she was twenty-three, she fell in love with and married Giuseppe, who was four years older. For Giuseppe seemed to her ‘The Way’. He ranted and raved, and believed that, yes, society should be changed: but he ranted and raved quietly. He supported the Communist Party, and believed that communism would provide post-war Italy with the only solution to its problems that it was likely to find; but he didn’t object, or not very strongly, to her supporting the Christian Democrats. And though he didn’t believe, he had in his quiet, neat way a faith that was just as strong as hers. He was certain of the eventual triumph of justice over injustice, of equality over inequality, of the hungry over the greedy, and looked forward to man’s ultimately being able to live in harmony not only with his fellow men, but with the whole world, animal, vegetable and mineral.

  ‘Of course it won’t happen overnight. I mean, it won’t happen in our lifetime, nor in Elisabetta’s, nor even in Elisabetta’s great-great-grandchildren’s lifetime,’ he told his wife. ‘But I do believe that one day, one day it will happen, and that when it does, people will look back at this time with the same sort of wonder with which we look back on—I don’t know—the Stone Age. And they’ll say to each other “How primitive they were,” and think how difficult life must have been, in those days.’

  A speech that conjured up in Maria’s mind a vision of a whole world full of quiet, neat people, and made her first give a wistful smile and then stroke her husband’s hair.

  He was a good man, she thought, even if he didn’t believe in God, and even if he sometimes told her that the word ‘good’ didn’t really mean very much anymore. Moreover, while she couldn’t adopt his faith as her own and tried to tell herself, as her Church told her, that it was evil, she knew that had he not had it, she would not have loved him. It was his faith, she told herself, that made him. It was his faith that kept him alive.

  It was this faith that Giuseppe made her understand that he had lost that summer. She wasn’t certain how he made her understand it; he didn’t suddenly turn to her and start telling her that he thought all workers who went on strike were traitors to the state and enemies of democracy; nor did he suddenly start extolling the virtues of the rich and the powerful, reading about the crowned heads of Europe in gossip magazines, or saying that he thought human beings were lazy pack-animals who needed to be kept in line by a strong leader. It was just that a certain strength seemed to have gone out of him, a certain inner tension. Plus the fact that when she looked at him and talked to him, she had the impression that, though the doctor had told him that his newly diagnosed disease wouldn’t kill him for years and years, he had in fact died already.

  ‘Oh, have they?’ he said, when she told him that ‘his communists’ had made some gains in a local election in Sicily. Murmuring, after she had asked him if he wanted to see a television report on this election, ‘No, not really.’ Then, ‘Well,’ he said without interest a few days later, when she told him that some engineer in Nuoro had got away with paying a small fine after a house he had built with substandard materials had collapsed and killed four people, ‘what do you expect?’

  ‘Oh, please Giuseppe,’ she wanted to tell him, ‘please don’t lose that. Because though of course it’s no longer true that I wouldn’t love you if you lost your faith, you’re going to need that faith to get through the years ahead and to get through your illness. Without it, it’s going to be dreadful, for both of us. You’ll have nothing to hang on to, nothing to stare at, except your illness; and if you do that for long enough you’ll go mad, or you’ll become depressed, or—oh, please, please,’ she wanted to tell her husband, ‘don’t lose that.’

  Naturally, however, she said no such thing, not being the sort of person to make statements of this nature; and simply watched, in vain, for some sign from Giuseppe that would tell her that she was wrong, or that if loss there had been, it was only temporary and what had gone would soon, in a matter of weeks if not days, be restored.

  She was still watching for this sign, and telling herself that of course she wouldn’t stop loving him, or at least caring for him, even if he didn’t regain his faith (how could she, under the circumstances?) when she realised that she too had fallen under the spell of one of the Cavalieris.

  She hadn’t really ‘fallen in love’; not as Giuseppe had with Amelia. Nevertheless, she had formed an attachment that was stronger than mere liking; and she did find herself watching and waiting for the object of her curious passion with something like the same intensity as she had once watched and waited for Giuseppe. Or even, she sometimes confessed to herself, with a somewhat greater intensity. For she had been a sensible, serious young woman at twenty-three, not much given to watching and waiting.

  You’ve become stupid with age, she told herself, as she spent longer and longer cleaning The Villa everyday, and found herself making cakes and biscuits more often than was usual for her, in order to take them to The Villa as presents. Stupid, and a little pathetic. After all, at least Giuseppe has fallen in love, if you must put it like that, with an adult woman. Whereas you, you’ve become enchanted with a child. A mere thirteen-year-old boy.

  She hadn’t, to begin with, when Dario had first started coming to have his extra maths lessons with Elisabetta. She had thought him just extremely polite, extremely pleasant and left it at that. What is more, she probably never would have, had she not discovered as she was cleaning Dado’s room in The Villa, in the days following the identification of Giuseppe’s illness and her realisation that he had lost his faith, that the great hulking youth, who was mad about sports, already nearly two metres tall and looked far older than his years, was behind with his mathematics, in part, because he wrote poetry.

  Maria had never read much poetry, apart from a bit of Dante and Leopardi she’d been forced to learn at school, and she couldn’t make head or tail of Dario’s efforts, which seemed to her so obscure as to be written, almost, in a foreign language. Reading his poems, however, or understanding them, was not the point. What seemed to her wonderful (as wonderful as Giuseppe’s having a vision of the world and being so convinced that one should or had to rebel, even while wearing, especially while wearing, a suit and tie), was the fact that he did it. And did it neither furtively, as if it were something to be ashamed of, nor too openly, as he might have done had he simply wanted to show off. No, Elisabetta’s now former pupil, Amelia’s sports-mad son, wrote poetry and that was an end to the matter. It went without saying, Maria told herself, that there were other factors involved. For a start, her sense that as well as being immensely, yet quite naturally polite, Dario had about him an air of great and equally natural seriousness. That seriousness that one generally finds only in intelligent adults who ar
e at ease with themselves, and that seriousness that, however much it borders on the sombre, does not preclude lightness, or humour, or grace.

  Then there was the fact that he was in his grave and, for his age, somewhat overgrown way, a good-looking boy; with the sort of quiet, unassertive good looks she had always admired in men. And finally, there was the fact that serious and well-mannered though he was, she detected in him a certain impatience with his mother—as if he considered her constant nervousness a matter for irritation rather than concern—and a quite definite sense of hostility whenever he so much as mentioned his father. Feelings she could not and would not go along with, especially as regards Amelia, but feelings which she supposed from a boy’s point of view had a certain justification. They were somewhat akin to Giuseppe’s attitude towards the rich and the powerful, and provided that necessary touch of sharpness to the sweetness of the knowledge that if Dario found his mother tiresome and disliked his father, he found the Bellettini family well-nigh perfect. From the beautiful black-haired maths-teaching Elisabetta, through the quiet and dignified Giuseppe, to, above all, the pale-skinned, faded auburn haired … well, Maria thought, whatever she was.

  As he did find them practically perfect, she knew, and had from the day he had met them all. Nor was it vanity that prompted her to tell herself this, since she had started to before it had ever occurred to her that the boy might write poetry, or that she might come to think of him as … as hope. ‘I know,’ she told Giuseppe, as soon as she realised—though Giuseppe did too—that Dario seemed to be infatuated with them all, ‘it’s only because he thinks we’re so different from his own family. He thinks we’re more simple or something, or more … I don’t know … down to earth. It’ll pass in a little while, I’m sure, and he’ll soon become like his parents. I suppose he won’t be able to help it, will he? And anyway, Amelia’s so nice, and it’s probably because he’s so big and healthy that he doesn’t like her being so delicate. He’ll probably be laughing at his feelings in a year or two and then’—and then come to think of us as stupid ignorant peasants, she thought but did not, now, say. ‘But I must say, for the moment, he is a very sweet boy, and … well, it’s always a pleasure to be liked, isn’t it?’